Demo Flight On A Rainy
Day Hemet, California (1998)
The day started out very dark and
gloomy. The sky was very grey and it looked like it was going start
raining at any moment.
A friend of mine (named Kent) who had been
driving up to Hemet with me every weekend to watch me fly, decided that
today he was going to go that extra step and give it a try.
His
demo flight lesson started out with a good preflight inspection and few
minutes of 'ground instruction' to orient him with flight procedures and
the use of controls.
As they taxied out to the main
runway, I discovered that my ultralights engine was going to be hard to
start that morning. After fussing with it for a few minutes I managed to
get it started, warmed up, and idling properly and soon and I was headed
out to get some photos of their flight.
Just south of Hemet is a
row of low hills that mark the boundary of the ultralight flying practice
area. No houses, a few roads for emergency landings, and almost no other
aircraft around. A great place for a demo flight. You can see how hazy the
day was. Completely grey and overcast.
Catching up with them was easy to do since my
Cobra "A" ultralight flies faster than the MXL trainer they were in.
Faster cruise usually means a higher stall speed and later on that became
a problem as I tried to slow down enough to fly formation with
them.
As I got closer, I had the opportunity to take this very
interesting point-of-view photo, with the hills in the background, and my
Cobra's airspeed indicator and compass in the foreground. If you look
closely, you'll see that I'm cruising at about 34 mph. My usual cruise is
around 47 to 50 mph.
The closer I got, the more I had
to keep slowing down my ultralight so as not to go zooming past them. At
one point I was flying so slow the Cobra entered 'slow flight' and the
controls got very mushy with the nose bobbing up and down as the tip of
the wings would stall then begin flying again. The Cobra "A" model has
very docile stall characteristics due to the 'wash out' of the wings. To
get a significant stall you have to work at it pretty hard. That was a
nice feature to have that day. The weather was getting more threatening
and at one point we actually flew into a light misting rain. Losing some
altitude got us out of the rain and our duo of ultralights headed back to
Hemet.
The flight back was totally uneventful though
just a bit moist from the rain we had flown through for a few
minutes.
"Another satisfied customer" is the best way to describe
this photo of Kent and his instructor right after the flight.
I
think that Kent will remember his flight for a long, long time.
